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Rockets and People
I showed no zeal for studying French, and later none for English.As far as German
was concerned, my father laid the foundation, combining it with mathematics and
Russian lessons.
I was accepted into School No. 70 of the Krasnaya Presnya region. It was
located on Sadovo-Kudrinskaya Street. 2 Until 1918 that building had been occupied
by a girls’ preparatory school. The teachers of the lower grades, having
shown their loyalty to the Soviet authority, remained in their positions. New
teachers came from the former technical school that had been located next door.
The girls’ preparatory school and boys’ technical school, the teachers told us, had
been schools for the privileged in that area of Moscow. Both buildings, which
were built in the late 1800s, were distinguished by the architectural monumentalism
of the classical Russian Empire style and the grand scale of the interior
spaces.The extremely wide hallways, spacious classrooms, excellently appointed
offices, sumptuous library, and large assembly hall were all now given to workers’
children. Incidentally, the class in which I was placed had considerably more
children of the intelligentsia, white-collar workers, and the new NEP bourgeoisie
than Krasnaya Presnya workers’ children. Bordering the school building
was a park with ancient linden trees.The park contained sports fields and even
an equestrian school.
Sadovo-Kudrinskaya Street was very garden-like, as was the case with the entire
Garden Ring of that era. Linden trees separated all of the buildings from the roadway,
the width of which was mostly taken up by the streetcar tracks of Ring Line
B.The street noise did not interfere with our activities in the least when we had
our windows wide open during pleasant weather. The large territory of the
schoolyard bordered on the sprawling Moscow Zoo. Getting a little ahead of
myself, I will add that soon thereafter the country’s first planetarium was built
between our school and the School of Higher Marxism, which had taken over the
former technical school building.After the war, the school building was transferred
into a scientific-research institute for biophysics that handled the problems
involved with preserving Lenin’s body.
In 1984, while enlightening my grandson Boris, I felt like boasting a bit about
my old school. Driving up in fine fashion in my Volga to the old familiar entrance,
I tried to gain entry with him into the building. My attempt was cut-off right at
the entrance. I had to change our itinerary and instead showed my grandson Patriarchs’
Ponds, which in the winter months in the 1920s was one of Moscow’s best
skating rinks.
“After skating to exhaustion I would accompany one of my classmates to her
home on Krasina Street,” I explained to my grandson.
“Let’s drive there. Show me,” he proposed unexpectedly.
2. This is a northwestern segment of the Sadovoye Koltso or Garden Ring. Now the middle of Moscow’s
three ring roads, the Garden Ring marked the city limits of pre-Stalinist Moscow.
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